publishing and everything e

Ereader Woes

I saw this article on Book Brunch today: The Ebook Transfer Headache. In it Nicholas Clee bewails the fact that although he has multiple ebook readers on multiple devices, he can’t swap books from one to the other – his Kobo books won’t work on his Kindle (needless to say) and the Waterstones books that he’s put on his Kobo reader won’t appear in the Kobo app on his new tablet; and he can’t move his Kobo books into another ereader …

The DRM is tying his purchases to the device or app of the retailer he got them from, even though the formats are supposedly compatible, and he’s within his allowed number of copies. It’s all so frustrating.

But I wonder whether the solution would be, in a way, worse. The only way that we could all have access to everything we’ve bought on any device would be for the whole lot to be stored in some sort of cloud. At the moment each retailer, be it Kobo, Kindle or iBooks, has their own cloud, so we can see our stuff on their apps; but a different company’s app is not linked to that cloud, so it doesn’t have access to that stuff.

The alternative would be that instead of giving us access to our books in a personalised area of their cloud, instead our purchases from all retailers are put into our own cloud. That means that all our stuff would be visible to any of our devices accessing our cloud.

The only way I could have my own cloud would be to rent space from a cloud storage company. That way all my stuff would be there all the time. It would be like Dropbox, or Google Docs.

But this throws up two questions:

Would the retailers – Kobo, Amazon et al – relinquish the files to my cloud in this way? Probably not because of all the valuable usage data they can collect from me, as I dip in and out of my purchases, reading my ebooks in their cloud.

Who would I trust to store my stuff in their cloud? I hate having all my eggs in someone else’s basket. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like Google, or Dropbox or anyone having access to all my digital belongings. For me there’s a massive privacy issue there – not that I’ve got anything to hide – I just want some privacy.

A partial solution for Mr Clee might be removing some of the DRM from the ebooks. That would make it easier for him to transfer them from one reader to another, but it wouldn’t make them transfer by themselves. He’d still have to side-load from his computer, or swap memory cards to and fro as he is already, but once they were transferred, they would work.

This all shows that at the moment the ebooks we buy are still very much tied to the retailer we buy them from. It’s more than an interoperability issue, and I think it is going to be a long time before retailers sacrifice the valuable market intelligence this gives them in favour of more convenience for their customers.